Against All Odds Read online

  Against All Odds

  Geeks of Caltech Book 4

  By Aarti V Raman

  Copyright © 2019 by Aarti V Raman

  E-books are not transferrable. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, on-screen or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the author.

  Piracy is not cool. Please, don’t do it!

  Aarti V Raman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this book. This is a work of fiction and any resemblance to real persons, places and incidents is purely coincidental.

  First Edition, Version 1.0 August 2019

  Cover designed by Shawn DSouza

  Cover images from Deposit Photos

  Table of Contents

  Books By Aarti V Raman

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The Billionaire Next Door: An Amnesia Romance

  When I Remember You: A Rockstar Amnesia Romance

  The Wilful Princess: Royals of Stellangård Book 2

  About The Author

  Books By Aarti V Raman

  STANDALONE ROMANCES

  More Than You Want

  The Perfect Fake

  Roark

  The Billionaire Next Door

  When I Remember You

  The Worst Daughter Ever

  GEEKS OF C@LTECH

  Still Not Over You

  Crossing Lines

  The Heart of You

  Against All Odds

  ROYALS OF STELLANGARD

  The Soldier Prince

  The Wilful Princess (Coming 2019)

  NOVELLAS

  Geeks of Caltech: Origins (Free with newsletter signup)

  A Tale of Two Christmases: A Geeks of Caltech Novella

  A Night Out With Royals: A Royals of Stellangård Novella

  BOX SET

  The Hot Kind of Wrong (A 3-in-1 compilation)

  Aarti V Raman sends out a newsletter – The Writer Gal Letter – which contains exclusive sneak peeks and giveaways and book recommendations! Sign up here to the Writer Gal Letter and receive a free ebook.

  For more information, visit www.aartivraman.com or www.aartivraman.wordpress.com.

  Find her on

  Facebook

  Instagram

  Twitter

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to

  Mom, my own True North

  The Big Guy In the Sky

  Roadies and Cameron Crowe for bringing me back to life

  …and the Roadies music. Oh such wild, wonderful music

  To the wonderful, daring, bold Startup Founders that I have had the pleasure of knowing – may all of you live long and prosper.

  Rafe Spall for being bossy and obnoxious and beautiful as Reg Whitehead.

  Chris Pratt. Starlord, I am writing as he never is, not ever. Not IRL, not on screen. That’s what makes it so deliciously perfect.

  Max, the one who will always be.

  Prologue

  Six years ago

  Delhi

  He was a man who’d lost everything.

  As Bharat Shankar Shrinivasan stood facing down the immutable, set faces of the seven people he was forced to call Board Members, he realized with a kind of numbness still protecting some essential, animal part of him that he had actually lost everything. Everything he had worked for, spilled blood and sweat for.

  The thing he had built with his own two hands - with nothing more than two lines of code he’d entered on a secondhand Mac five years ago - he had lost it all.

  He was aware of a buzzing in his ears. Like when he’d done too much coke and the world was clear, pure in a way it wasn’t when he wasn’t high.

  The whirr of the air conditioner buzzed in an undercurrent that didn’t dissipate the single stream of sweat pouring down his back, down the line of his spine.

  He was falling apart inside. A scream threatened to tear out of his throat and wreak havoc on this world. On these seven men and women who’d decided something on his behalf, something that was supposedly for the good of the company, the asset they wanted to protect…

  Protect from him.

  Protect the thing he had created from himself.

  “I want to be certain,” he said in a calm voice. The scream was held in a choke chain inside of him. “I want to be very certain of what you are all proposing. I don’t want to make any more mistakes.”

  “Bharat,” one of the Board Members said. Bharat wasn’t sure who it was. They had all blended into one faceless, homogenous mass of suits and figures. Cold-blooded, vampiric, and absolute in their judgment. “Bharat, I am sorry that it has come down to this but you have to see, you cannot deny, this is what’s best for the company.”

  “My company,” he shot back, with a flicker of heat. Then he banked it deep down inside.

  Exercised a measure of icy control where he knew he had none. Not an iota of self-preservation and control.

  “It stopped being yours when you handed over control to the Board,” the man, Lalwani, continued. With less regret and more spine. “It stopped being yours when you decided that your… proclivities were more important to you than being a responsible CEO. Hell, a responsible adult.”

  “I was always against having such a young CEO at the helm,” Manoj Giridhar, the naysayer, spoke up next.

  Giridhar was a VC stooge. He only thought in terms of bottom-line and growth graphs. He didn’t understand a goddamn thing.

  “I wasn’t a young CEO when you handed me 400 million.” Bharat laid his hands palm down on the edge of the T-shaped table.

  He was at the end of the T, with the other Board Members and senior management filling out every seat. He stood, like a recalcitrant child hauled in front of the Principal. In his head, he was a recalcitrant child. Not the CEO of a multi-million dollar company.

  God, he wanted to scream.

  “I was only twenty-four when you handed me that check and told me to go make every app on the market accountable to JoyXS.”

  He looked at each of them, forcing them to make eye contact. Forcing them to acknowledge the ugliness of what was going down right now.

  This was an execution. His execution.

  “The sad truth is we are all culpable in what happened here,” Rajeev Kulashreshtha said. Grimly, with a touch of regret.

  Rajeev was the man he respected. The man he’d looked up to, as a replacement father figure to the one he’d never had.

  Rajeev was the man who had ultimately betrayed him.

  Right now though, Rajeev didn’t look angry so much as…resigned. As if he expected no less from Bharat than this display of defiance.

  That hurt.

  “We looked the other way for a long time because you were so very good at product development and you seemed to…have v
ision.”

  “And now I have no vision anymore?” Bharat couldn’t help the bitterness coating his voice, his very soul.

  What the fuck was happening? How could this be happening to him? He was Bharat Shankar Shrinivasan! He was invincible. He was the Iron Man! He didn’t get executed. He didn’t lose everything.

  “You do,” Rajeev replied, not bothering to hold back anymore. “But, unfortunately, your vision can’t support your reality. The drinking binges, the wild parties with questionable women, and last week…getting arrested for drugs possession.”

  Rajeev shook his head, a shock of white hair falling on his forehead. White that hadn’t been there a year ago.

  Bharat shook his head too, still tasting the tang of the metallic water of jail. Delhi jails were notoriously unkempt and he knew he was lucky to have escaped with nothing more than a rap on his wrist and a bail bond he could pay many times over.

  It was the media crucifixion he couldn’t afford.

  Not him or JoyXS, his precious company.

  It was the media that had publicly hung him out to dry and given this goddamn seven-member Board the ammunition they needed to blast him out of his own company.

  “What if I said I have changed?” Bharat asked, with as much dignity as he could muster. He did not think of it as begging. It wasn’t begging if it was begging for his life.

  “What if I went to rehab and I issued a public statement? What if I resigned as CEO and took up a more horizontal position?”

  He’d never wanted to be CEO anyway. It had been thrust on him because JoyXS had been his vision, created from his code. And he thought he could handle it. That he could handle the extreme pressure of leading a team of two hundred and fifty, keep standing on the bleeding edge of tech and not lose his goddamn mind.

  So what if he had turned to a little coke, a little weed to take the edge off? Sean Parker had done it, hadn’t he? And look what he’d created. Napster. Facebook!

  “What if I cut back on all my responsibilities and we rebranded the company so someone else became the face and I just…”

  Rajeev shook his head. He wasn’t Chairman of the Board. That would be Jobin Matthews, a man of few words. Jobin had yet to open his mouth and say a word. He’d yet to even look at Bharat.

  But Rajeev spoke for the Board, Bharat knew that. Rajeev was the bridge between the Board and Bharat – translating Bharat’s wild, half-baked ideas into concrete saleable points that the men who approved such ideas could get behind and approve.

  He’d made the company into what it was as much as Bharat himself.

  “I am afraid any further association with you, even in a background capacity, will hurt what little chance this company has of being acquired.”

  Bharat licked dry lips. “Please.” The word was low, bottomless and heard by all seven. Now, he was begging. And he knew it. They knew it. He couldn’t care.

  “I won’t oppose the merger bid. Just let me stay on in any capacity.”

  Jobin spoke then. “Bharat Shankar Srinavasan, in the past six months your actions have been reckless and irrational. They have caused irreparable damage to the company, morale is at an all-time low and your supposed best friend and the CTO of this company has actually suffered a mental breakdown. You are reckless and dangerous and a liability to this company, which makes you useless to this board. You are hereby relieved of your position as CEO of the company, effective immediately. All those in favor of the motion say aye.”

  Seven ayes split the air.

  “All those who oppose the same can speak now. Say nay.” There was utter silence.

  Even the AC had stopped whirring.

  “Madam, please take down the minutes of the meeting.” Jobin instructed Sujatha Parishar, the woman who’d come from Bharat’s old engineering firm where he’d been programming like a good little robot till the idea for JoyXS had driven him to start up on his own, three years ago.

  Sujatha’s lips trembled as she typed the required minutes into her nifty little laptop.

  “We respect your loyalty to the company and appreciate it. For this reason alone, we’d like to propose the total buyout of your majority stake for two million. Right now. The agreement is on the table and waits your signature.”

  At those words, the lawyer puppet placed the agreement, a sheaf of papers, on the table.

  “You’re fucking kidding me,” Bharat exploded. “Two million for fifty-four percent?”

  Jobin shrugged. The perfect Ice Man. The man from the US VC firm who’d handed him the Series B check and told Bharat to not fuck it up.

  And he had, anyway. Spectacularly.

  “We think it’s pretty generous considering the company is not valued much more than that at the moment.”

  “Fuck your offer.”

  Jobin leaned back. “Is that your final answer? Can we have it on record?”

  Rajeev closed his eyes. Even more strained than before.

  Bharat was about to nod yes, an emphatic last fuck you at the suits and figures who didn’t understand how he worked, how genius worked with their pathetic little projections and their bar graphs and their incessant meetings.

  Then he caught himself. He choked more of his screams and the rage back down.

  Twenty lakhs, which was what two million amounted to, was a lot of money. It was a decent sum of money even converting to dollars.

  He couldn’t, in all good conscience, afford to turn it down. Even though it was the ultimate in humiliation - JoyXS’s seed funding round had raised more than five mil three years ago.

  But, twenty lakhs meant freedom. It meant he didn’t have to start from scratch if he started up again. His scream turned inward.

  No! He was never starting up again. Not ever. This world of tech and startups was vicious and unforgiving.

  It had killed him.

  It had killed every last good thing about him and left him rotting inside a Delhi jail cell like a strung out junkie.

  A single breath trembled out.

  “The clock is ticking, Bharat,” Jobin said.

  Rajeev leaned in and murmured something to him. Jobin shook his head sharply. He looked at Bharat with cool disdain. The look a man gave a pathetic, groveling boy.

  Hating himself, hating everything, hating the universe, Bharat reached for the papers. “I’ll take it.”

  There was a swift intake of breath. He imagined it was one of his former friends who’d thrown him under the bus with nothing more than a qualm.

  Except, that wasn’t exactly true. They had begged him to stop. They had all begged him to stop drinking and getting stoned. But he didn’t want to listen.

  He didn’t want to be ordinary.

  Bharat reached for the pen he customarily kept in his pocket and felt empty air. He looked down at the open collar polo shirt and jeans he’d worn in open defiance of corporate protocol. The shirt had no pocket and he had no pen to sign his life away with.

  A fierce sense of self-loathing filled his very marrow.

  What had happened to him that he’d become reduced to this… this caricature of himself?

  The lawyer puppets produced a blue gel pen, handed it to Bharat. He unscrewed the cap and scrawled his signature over the yellow tabs. Unseeing. Uncaring. Not wanting to care. It hurt to care.

  Finally, it was over and it was done with. When Bharat raised his trembling aching, head, he looked at Rajeev’s forlorn, disappointed face.

  Bharat shook his head. He didn’t care about Rajeev or anyone. They’d all betrayed him. Everyone had betrayed him.

  “We’d like you escorted off the premises now, please,” Jobin continued. Speaking the most since Bharat first pitched to the man, all those years ago. “Your belongings, work stations, notes and other items are property of the company so you won’t be needing them anymore. You also have a non-compete clause that is liable for litigation should you entertain working for our competitors, our clients or anyone else remotely associated with JoyXS.”

  “I h
ave no interest in associating with anyone remotely associated with this company,” Bharat assured them thickly.

  “That is fortunate then and we are in complete agreement. You may leave now.”

  And just like that, with a flick of a wrist and a nod of a man’s imperious head his execution was complete.

  Bharat wanted to say something, anything, exit on a lion’s roar.

  In the end, he picked up the agreement copy because it seemed the thing to do, held it loosely between numb fingers and walked out of the conference room on the corner offices in Gurugram’s HiTech Tower.

  The elevator banks showed in front of him almost by magic. He punched the down button. Seemed appropriate.

  He stepped in when the doors dinged open and pressed the button for B. B for Basement Parking. Right where his career was. In the basement.

  He stuffed the papers in the waistband of his jeans and whipped out his phone. Texted a number that only a handful of people in the world possessed. The number of a very dangerous man.

  I’m done in JoyXS. What do I do now, Shiv? His fingers trembled at the words he’d just posted.

  The reply came back gratifyingly fast. Come to Pasadena. I’m Stateside, right now.

  “Bharat, wait.” Rajeev called out, from the other end of the corridor. He sounded frantic.

  Bharat viciously punched the doors close.

  Rajeev ran for the lift, an old man over sixty, more than twice Bharat’s age. He couldn’t reach it on time. He punched the button the down button but Bharat was faster, quicker, younger. He had more venom.

  “I’ll never forget this,” Bharat whispered inside the steel cage. “I’ll never forget today. I’ll never be this helpless again.” He promised himself.

  The doors closed on Rajeev’s agonized face and the words he was mouthing.

  “I’m sorry, Bharat.”

  A text message popped up on Bharat’s screen. It was from Shiv Naren Pal, the one man guaranteed to show no empathy to Bharat. I’m sorry, Bharat.

  Chapter One

  Now

  The Lotus Dragon

  Sydney